GLSEN Gets a New
Boss

You could say GLSEN is getting a new principal.

On Wednesday the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network announced that Eliza Byard will become its new executive director, replacing founder and longtime executive director Kevin Jennings. Byard, who takes the reins on November 1, spoke to The Advocate about the task ahead for LGBT students and all of us who want to see them thrive.

Any discussion of GLSEN has to begin with Jennings, whose face has been synonymous with the organization he founded. Byard has been Jennings's deputy since 2001, yet a GLSEN without Jennings may take a bit of getting used to.

"GLSEN was the brainchild of a very visionary, powerful individual," Byard said. "Our history to date has been very much intertwined with his, and I think that makes sense. [Now] we're at a stage in the organization's growth where it's ready to be an institution that has many different faces. That's been forced upon us by Kevin's decision to leave, but it's also the next right step for the institution as a whole."

Byard threw her hat in the ring for the executive director job but "insisted" on a national search, according to a statement by Bob Chase, GLSEN national board chair. Six months later, Byard got the job by unanimous vote.

"I was pretty overwhelmed by the warmth and enthusiasm of the response," she said. "It meant the world to me."

While Jennings came to GLSEN directly from the classroom, Byard got her start as a producer working in film and TV.

"I was working at channel 13 [the PBS flagship in New York] when I was 13," Byard said, not kidding. She even interned as a teen with journalist's journalist Bill Moyers. "I always had the opportunity to work on things that really matter to me. Mentors like [Moyers] really gave me a sense of the larger purpose of the work."

Byard and Jennings first crossed paths in 1995, when both joined the creative team for the 1996 documentary Out of the Past, which interweaves the story of the struggle to create a GSA in Salt Lake City with pivotal chapters of LGBT history. Byard cowrote, coproduced, and coedited the film; it won the audience award at Sundance and later aired on PBS.

Education fascinated her, for a couple of reasons.

"One, I was studying U.S. history," she said. (She would go on to earn a Ph.D.) "Two, I did a project for Frontline [in 1994] called School Colors that was about multiculturalism in public education 40 years after Brown v. Board of Education. From my own experience and from the people I was around making that film, I've always had a clear sense that education and school experience is crucial as one of the few shared experiences that Americans have."

As Byard points out, GLSEN has many faces. The organization Jennings founded 18 years ago with some 70 fellow teachers is now a national player, with offices in New York and Washington, D.C.; 40 staffers; and some 4,000 registered gay-straight alliances in schools across the country.

One of the organization's original concepts, GSAs have proved remarkably effective in fostering understanding and friendship gay and straight students -- so much so that rather than sanction GSAs, administrators bent on discouraging gay visibility have sometimes banned all student clubs.

Newer GLSEN school awareness programs include No Name-Calling Week, inspired by James Howe's young adult novel The Misfits; and the annual Day of Silence, which was dedicated in 2008 to slain gay California eighth-grader Lawrence King. Then there's the brand-new "ThinkB4YouSpeak" campaign created by the Ad Council -- GLSEN's biggest effort ever, with a $2 million budget, celebrity participation, and media outreach to some 33,000 stations.

The need continues. According to GLSEN's just-released 2007 National School Climate Survey, including more than 6,000 respondents, nine out of 10 LGBT students experienced harassment at school in the past year, three fifths felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, and about a third skipped a day of school in the past month because they felt unsafe.

Byard, whose 3-year-old daughter just started kindergarten, said she means to improve school safety on her watch -- and more. "We have had a very important and very narrow strategic focus on safety, which is a crucial piece of this puzzle and a very important front for a lot of continued focus. But one of the things that always appealed to me about GLSEN is that, right at its founding, it made a central commitment to this idea of learning communities that are diverse, that are shared, that are for everyone."

That sharing is the long-term goal, as Byard sees it -- not just a safe school culture but one that really prizes different kinds of students, including those who are LGBT. When every student is comfortable enough to learn, every other student benefits. It's that simple.

"Viscerally, to any parent, when they really think about it, they'd get it," Byard said. "Any educator, when they really think about it, they'd get it. It's about a shared hope for all our kids, a shared hope for everybody who works in a school and cares about young people and cares about the future. Come on, you don't go to work in a school unless you care about the future."